Children’s drawings provides insight into future intelligence

Children’s drawings provides insight into future intelligence

Not just child's play, researchers have found the detail in a 4-year-olds drawing can reveal their future IQ.

Children’s drawings provides insight into future intelligence

So how did scientists come to this startling conclusion?

Researchers at the UK’s Kings College Institute of Psychiatry invited more than 7,00 pairs of twins to draw picture of a child.

The picture was then scored on the number of feature sit contained, such as arms, legs, hands, feet etc.

They found a strong link between higher drawing scores, more detailed drawings, and later intelligence results.

The Draw-a-Child test was devised in the 1920’s to assess children’s intelligence levels at age four.

“Drawing is an ancient behaviour, dating back beyond 15,000 years ago. Through drawing, we are attempting to show someone else what’s in our mind,” lead researcher Dr Rosalind Arden told reporters.

“This capacity to reproduce figures is a uniquely human ability and a sign of cognitive ability, in a similar way to writing, which transformed the human species’ ability to store information, and build a civilisation,” she added.

What surprised researchers most was that the results correlated with intelligence findings almost a decade later.

But Dr Arden says parents should not worry if their child draws badly .

“Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life.”

the study also examined whether drawing ability was an inherited trait by separating the work of identical twins and non identical twins and then comparing them against each other.

The reason they did this is because identical twins share the exact same genes while non-identical twins share only 50 per cent of their genes. regardless both types of twins usually share in the same environmental factors such as family background and upbringing.

images drawn by the identical twins were more similar to one another than those drawn by non-identical twin pairs. giving the researchers evidence to conclude that drawing ability had some genetic link.